Long before reaching its shocking, blood-soaked conclusion, Tracy Letts’ “The Minutes” – ticketed for Broadway next spring but now receiving its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago – resembles a Greek tragedy.

But this tense and taut thriller – directed by Anna D. Shapiro and featuring a terrific ensemble stuffed with Steppenwolf veterans – begins as a slice of folksy Americana, unfolding in the neoclassical council chambers of a midsize heartland city named Big Cherry.

Having spent a moment in prayer before dutifully pledging allegiance to the flag, Mayor Superba (William Petersen) and eight council members get down to business, which includes a discussion of parking and architectural plans for a new fountain.

But as with Thornton Wilder’s seemingly genial Grover’s Corners – or any one of those ostensibly friendly but invariably nightmarish towns dotting the map of Stephen King’s world – the business behind this business isn’t nearly so benign.

Council Member Carp (Ian Barford) is absent; nobody will explain why to the newest council member, who’d been absent when Carp was voted off the island during the preceding week’s meeting.

A naïve but well-intentioned outsider, new to town and to politics, Peel (Cliff Chamberlain) asks to see the minutes from that meeting so he can understand what went down. When the city clerk (Brittany Burch) finally coughs them up, the council meeting takes an abrupt left turn and the fur begins to fly.

What Carp had then been carping about – subtle, Letts’ names aren’t – goes to the heart of Big Cherry’s image of itself, involving the truth behind a civic myth that’s whitewashed one of the most infamous slaughters of native peoples in American history (that massacre is never named, but Letts’ chosen date for this faux foundation story makes clear he has Sand Creek in mind).

Will this city own its past, even if that undermines its image of itself? Can we, living in the land of the free and home of the brave? And when even the most liberal among us choose instead to go along so we can get along, what does that say about who we are? Is history, as the mayor insists, a verb, allowing us to write the story we please? Or does it have a weight of its own?

NEWSLETTERS

Get the Weekend Guide newsletter delivered to your inbox

We're sorry, but something went wrong

Ready for the weekend? Kathy Flanigan offers tips on things to do every week

Letts has asked such questions before – his Pulitzer-winning “August: Osage County” immediately comes to mind – but never this directly or with so much anger, all this play’s bent humor notwithstanding.

Although he finished his first draft before last November’s election, what Letts has written joins novelist Ali Smith’s “Autumn” as one of the first great works of art interrogating the meaning of the Trump era, in which we’ve never more needed to take a hard look at who we are and how we got here.

“The Minutes” has been extended through Jan. 7 at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 1650 N. Halsted St. in Chicago. For tickets, visit www.steppenwolf.org/.

Saving Shakespeare in “Book of Will”

History is also imperiled in Lauren Gunderson’s “The Book of Will,” which transforms a story that’s potentially only for Shakespeare nerds into a riveting and inspiring play about why we tell stories in the first place. Or go to the theater to see Shakespeare. It’s now receiving its Midwest premiere at Skokie’s Northlight Theatre, under Jessica Thebus’ direction.

As Gunderson suggests, we likely couldn’t see or wouldn’t even know about plays like “Julius Caesar,” “Macbeth” and “Twelfth Night” – among the 18 Shakespeare plays that weren’t published in the Bard’s lifetime – but for the efforts of two veteran actors from Will’s theater troupe: the odd couple of Henry Condell (Gregory Linington) and John Heminges (Jim Ortlieb).

Shakespeare's friends labor to save the text of his plays in Northlight Theatre's production of "The Book of Will."(Photo: LIz Lauren)

With Shakespeare and most of those who’d played alongside him now dead, words we think of as immortal were set to die out – or be hopelessly mangled, as they are in the bastardized production of “Hamlet,” based on a pirated script that’s rife with errors, opening Gunderson’s play.

In a world where books were rare and plays either got published or quickly vanished, Shakespeare seemed sure to disappear until Condell and Heminges spearheaded the seemingly impossible feat of gathering together flotsam and jetsam – an actor’s scroll here, a prompt book there – surviving the fire burning Shakespeare’s Globe to the ground.

They receive invaluable assistance from their strong and smart wives (Rengin Altay and McKinley Carter). From John’s daughter (Dana Black), channeling the Bard’s many great father-daughter relationships. From the troupe’s tightly wound scrivener (Thomas J. Cox). From longtime rival Ben Jonson (William Dick). And from the idealistic son (Luigi Sottile) of a blackguard publisher who owned the rights to much of Will’s work that had been published, often badly and inaccurately.

The result was the First Folio of 1623, gathering 36 of Shakespeare’s 38 surviving plays.

As she invariably does in her history plays, Gunderson adeptly chronicles the back story she tells; we’re given the necessary context without ever feeling like we’re eating spinach.

But as is also continually true with this exceptionally talented playwright, the real story involves her characters’ quest for knowledge and lust for life – undertaken here as in so many of her plays as a race against time and the certainty of death.

Once again, here, Gunderson’s characters live as though they’re running out of time; in the plague-ridden, short-lived London of the early 17th century, they always were. Three characters die in this play; others are ailing and most are old.

But in saving Will, they gave us a book that outlived them and will outlast us. As with “Shakespeare in Love” – which “The Book of Will” both resembles and surpasses – Gunderson’s play suggests that Shakespeare’s great characters transcend time, giving all of us an intimation of immortality, through fictional lives embodying our best and truest selves.

“The Book of Will” continues through Dec. 17 at Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Blvd (adjacent to the Old Orchard shopping complex) in Skokie, Il. For tickets visit www.northlight.org/.

Getting 'Earnest'

The coruscating wordplay in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” can seem light-years removed from the sustained meditations in Letts and Gunderson’s plays on the relation between history and story.

“Earnest” is usually played for its witty lines and its corresponding laughs – transforming its characters into self-consciously clever, borderline campy embodiments of a silly society that doesn’t have a clue about what it means to be earnest.

Wilde is such a great writer that even such baroque productions can be fun. But when Wilde’s characters become omniscient and wink as much as he does, it lowers the stakes, reducing a great play to a droll parlor game.

Alex Goodrich, Jennifer Latimore and Rebecca Hurd perform in Writers Theatre's production of "The Importance of Being Earnest."(Photo: Liz Lauren)

Conversely, director Michael Halberstam’s Writers cast gives us a sense of what such parlor games cost: they stifle feeling and retard emotional development. In a world where everything is about style, there can be no substance – and no means of discovering who one really is. It’s the same dilemma, played in a very different key, confronting Letts’ Big Cherry council members.

Hence the nearly existential angst expressed by Alex Goodrich, digging deeper as Jack Worthing than I’ve ever seen an actor in this role go.

When Goodrich’s Jack tells Shannon Cochran’s Lady Bracknell that he doesn’t know who he is or where he’s come from, it’s less funny than deeply unsettling: Jack, like every wealthy Victorian, must confront how little he’s done to merit all he’s inherited. Never mind the even bigger question of how that money was made. Origins in “Earnest” are inherently scandalous.

Scenic designer Collette Pollard and costume designer Mara Blumenfeld drive home what’s missing from the story by creating a two-dimensioned and largely monochromatic milieu, but for the one strong color – a different one, for each of three acts – giving a semblance of life to all in this superficial world that’s flat.

What lies beneath these surfaces, hollowed of meaning and leached of life? And if it’s truly important to be earnest, don’t we owe it to ourselves to find out, learning our history so that we might live authentic lives within a sustainable future?

“Earnest,” like the other two shows reviewed here, isn’t your typical holiday fare. But each of these three excellent and trenchant seasonal productions offer a timely year’s end challenge. Urging us to tell the truth about what’s made us who we are, they light the way toward the better stories we might create and live together, in the new year of 2018 and every year thereafter.